{"id":26525,"date":"2024-04-14T22:31:08","date_gmt":"2024-04-14T22:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/14\/a-7-year-old-girl-is-the-lone-serious-casualty-of-irans-barrage\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T22:31:08","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T22:31:08","slug":"a-7-year-old-girl-is-the-lone-serious-casualty-of-irans-barrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/14\/a-7-year-old-girl-is-the-lone-serious-casualty-of-irans-barrage\/","title":{"rendered":"A 7-Year-Old Girl Is the Lone Serious Casualty of Iran\u2019s Barrage"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/div>


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The hospital waiting room was quiet on Sunday: There was no crowd of relatives, no flood of patients. Israel\u2019s air defenses had just fended off a large-scale Iranian attack, with only one serious casualty recorded.<\/p>\n

But there was no sense that a crisis had been averted outside the pediatric intensive care unit at Soroka Medical Center in southern Israel\u2019s city of Beersheba. Instead, tension filled the air until the doors to the ward swung open and a gasping mother stumbled out, her face contorted. Then raw emotion quickly took its place as she crumbled into a chair, crying.<\/p>\n

While Israel suffered little in the way of significant damage overnight, this one family was dealt a devastating blow. Amina al-Hasoni, 7, was clinging to life \u2014 the sole serious casualty of the Iranian barrage. And were it not for systemic inequities in Israel, her relatives said, maybe she too could have been spared.<\/p>\n

There are roughly 300,000 Arab Bedouins in the Negev desert. About a quarter of them live in villages that are not recognized<\/a> by Israeli officials. Without state recognition, those communities have long suffered from a lack of planning and basic services like running water, sewers and electricity. And few have access to bomb shelters, despite repeated requests to the state.<\/p>\n

The Hasoni family lives in one such community, sharing a hilltop in the Negev village of al-Fur\u2019ah with a plot of disconnected houses. When rocket warning sirens went off on Saturday night, Amina\u2019s uncle Ismail said he felt stuck \u2014 there was nowhere to go.<\/p>\n

Booms overhead signaled air defenses intercepting missiles before there was a big explosion. Then he heard a woman screaming \u2014 his sister \u2014 and \u201cI started running,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Ismail, 38, found his sister outside her house holding Amina, who was bleeding from the head. Her family had decided to flee the rockets, running out the front door. But Amina, who slept in a back room with pink walls covered in painted butterflies, didn\u2019t make it.<\/p>\n

A missile fragment ripped through the home\u2019s thin metal roof, shearing a hole with sharp metallic edges. It made impact just in front of the door \u2014 which is where Amina was knocked unconscious.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it hit her while she was running away,\u201d Ismail said.<\/p>\n

He said he took the injured Amina from his sister and lifted the girl into his own arms. Ismail then tracked down a car that raced her toward the hospital, more than 40 minutes away on a rutted, winding road that fades out in some places, with camels crossing in others.<\/p>\n

Only then, with Amina on her way, did he go inside the house, where he said he saw a large, black piece of shrapnel about the size of a pretzel jar. And \u201cthere was blood,\u201d he said, a puddle that had turned into a stream across the tile floor, to the front door.<\/p>\n

By Sunday afternoon, the orange patterned tiles had been cleaned. None of the dozen or so relatives there could say who had done it, only that \u201cit was bad for the children to see\u201d all the blood. But Ismail hasn\u2019t gone back inside.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s difficult,\u201d he said, his jeans and boots still spattered with blood. Not far from where he sat, a pink Minnie Mouse blanket and a small black-and-white girl\u2019s dress hung on a family clothesline.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could have built shelters here,\u201d Ismail added.<\/p>\n

He dismissed any suggestions that what happened to Amina was bad luck.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s part of a policy,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can\u2019t do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

The missile fragment that tore into Amina\u2019s home was one of more than 150 collected in the area on Sunday by police bomb disposal teams, and the family said officers had taken away the piece that hit their home. The teams combed the desert for hours, searching for debris and carting away huge hunks of twisted metal \u2014 efforts repeated across Israel.<\/p>\n

The Hasoni home is not far from a military base, Nevatim, that was reportedly a target of the Iranian assault and that Israeli officials said was lightly damaged.<\/a><\/p>\n

That is little consolation to Amina\u2019s father, Muhammad, who spent the morning at the hospital taking turns at her bedside. He didn\u2019t say much to her, he said, and just repeated her name.<\/p>\n

Amina \u2014 the youngest of his 14 children \u2014 \u201clikes to laugh and have fun all the time,\u201d said Muhammad, 49. She\u2019s a good student with a \u201cstrong personality,\u201d he added, who doesn\u2019t always listen to instructions. And she loves to draw.<\/p>\n

He called Iran\u2019s actions \u201cinhumane.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMay God demolish them,\u201d he said, without hesitation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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The hospital waiting room was quiet on Sunday: There was no crowd of relatives, no flood of patients. Israel\u2019s air defenses had just fended off a large-scale Iranian attack, with only one serious casualty recorded. But there was no sense that a crisis had been averted outside the pediatric intensive care unit at Soroka Medical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/04\/14\/multimedia\/14mideast-crisis-negev-htkp\/14mideast-crisis-negev-htkp-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31470,25437,31471,1522,21116,17618],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26525"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26525"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26527,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26525\/revisions\/26527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}